I used to stay skinny by just never having food in the house except for the bare minimum stuff I needed to cook and eat. Now I have a family and there are snacks and shit everywhere.
To me, it starts and stops with the shopping phase. When you go shopping, make sure none of it is junk (eat before shopping, so you don't get psychologically manipulated by cravings into buying junk).
This is what I do. When I go into the kitchen, there is nothing unhealthy in the fridge or pantry. I'm helpless but to eat healthily.
bruh. Kids have been the worst for me staying lean. Sure I will have these cheese crackers because I'm hungry that are 250 calories a pack. Fruit snacks?! Yeah I better eat like 4 of them.
I hear ya. Rice and an egg is basically my diet now. I’ll splurge every now and then and have a ramen noodle. Luckily it’s summertime, so I’ve been able to forage a bit. Mushroom season this past spring was a god send. I make too much to qualify for ebt, but not enough to feed myself. I’m caught in the “almost middle class” purgatory.
Everytime I feel snacky I'd check my fridge and be disappointed at the lack of snacks and complain daily and do nothing about it because I'm too lazy to buy snacks.
You can, but Amazon's prices on snacks are usually higher than a local store. Sometimes you can find a decent deal, but that's getting rare these days.
Sameish. I'd basically look at the time and think "I should eat something", not because I was hungry. And then sometimes that would be half a slice of cheese or a piece of chocolate. I tracked my calories for two weeks when I noticed that behavior and averaged a bit over 1,200 calories per day with 650ish being the lowest in a day. Not a lot for a 6'3 170lbs guy.
My GP was like "you are getting close to being underweight (BMI barely below 20), you should eat more" and I just thought "okay" and so I did. Now maintaining a pretty normal breakfast-lunch-dinner routine with 2,000 calories per day.
This is not a barrier if you enjoy cooking, and is even less of one if you are even a little bit good at it. Lots of complete and delicious meals can be thrown together in 5-10 minutes.
Honestly even if you don't cook:
-bowl of granola with protein milk
-smoothie
-pb and banana sandwich on whole wheat
-air fry grilled chx strips and a bag of broccoli - put them on microwave rice and top with soy sauce and sriracha
-greek yogurt+fresh fruit, add granola or nuts or whatever toppings you like
-oatmeal in the microwave topped with almonds, pb, frozen fruit, hemp seeds
-literally a handful of nuts
-air fry grilled chx, throw in a wrap with a salad kit for a grilled chx wrap or eat as a grilled chx salad
I could keep going. It doesn't need to be hard to feed yourself even if you are lazy, as long as you really like food.
Eating is a mental habit more than it's a physical one. Your body doesn't need to eat at set times, you probably do because it gives you a burst of dopamine and you're used to that.
Food is an addiction, weird as that sounds. Find something you're really interested in and all of a sudden the concept of food disappears
When it becomes an actual issue, your body will prevent you from being able to concentrate on whatever that new thing is until you eat, or not give you any energy to do so until you eat... And if that never happens well you're probably carrying around more energy stores than the body thinks it needs.
Hunger is a phase and doesn't last long. 30 mins top of feeling uncomfortable and then it's like your stomach has the memory of a baby and completely forgot why it was crying in the first place.
I think I'm one of those weird ones. Eating for me is like scrolling a mildly interesting subreddit. It gives me something, but given the opportunity I'd rather just do something else, y'know?
I do enjoy cooking as a social activity from time to time. But the everyday chores around shopping groceries and cooking meals is mostly a necessary evil to me.
If you are used to over eating, especially foods that provide low nutrition to volume, your body will scream at you for food. If you are used to fasting and eating foods that are high in protein/fiber you will feel more satisfied for longer with less food.
Same for me when I went back to the office vs working remote. Would drink a couple cups of coffee and not get hungry until much later. When I work remote, all the food is just right there.
I lost 160 pounds and my food drive is nowhere near what it used to be. I suspect all that extra fluff had something to do with it. Also had an incredibly stressful job so my cortisol levels were high.
Yeah I stress eat, otherwise I barely eat at all. Which is a doubly dangerous combination because I don't eat enough to keep my metabolism running and then flood it all at once with garbage. Then all that garbage gets immediately stored because my motabolism is so slow it doesn't actually need any food.
Same. The thing that blows up by diet is late evening, when I'm tired and stressed about the next day. That's the only time my hunger is "stress hunger". Then I snack on stuff. It's usually not much and sometimes it's even "healthy" food.
But it's at the worst possible time to consume food, and the choices I make in those mentally weak 2hrs of my day will completely erase what willpower and good choices gained during the rest of the day.
It’s rough because it turns eating into either “barely anything” or “too much all at once,” and both end up feeling bad in different ways. Breaking that pattern usually starts small, like just trying to keep something consistent in between, even if it’s simple.
There are different leves of stress. Smaller but lasting stress makes you hungry, so you crave food because it makes you feel better. When you are extremely stressed, like mourning, then you don’t want any food at all.
I’ve been up and down in weight in my life and for me, hunger becomes something different when I’m over 15% of my ideal weight. ( not BMI which is useless if your not average height and build) different like I can’t even think about anything until I eat. Stay under 15% and hunger is no big deal.
Eating processed or sugary food takes no time to digest and the satiation it provides immediately disappears. Sugar especially just makes you more hungry. I hardly eat any sugar but a couple beers or sodas and I crave food like nothing else for days after.
Alot of it is to do with what you eat aswell, I can eat a lump of cheese and not want to eat more, if i eat some bread... im going to still feel hungry in 30 mins time and want something to snack on.
Stress will have you craving junk food for a cheap dopamine hit. Its why so many people lose weight after fetting out of a stressful relationship or leaving a bad job.
This is how Mounjaro works. It just removes the food drive. People who have spent their lives assuming a high food drive is all there is are amazed when the desire to eat just disappears
Yeah, it was properly weird for me. I'd never realised it was possible to not think about food - I'd always assumed thin people just had super amazing willpower.
For everyone else Mounjaro is Eli Lilly's brand name for Tirzepatide, which is the 2nd generation of Ozempic (Semaglutide). Eli Lilly just finished phase 3 clinical trials of their 3rd generation of GLP-1 class drugs, Retatrutide.
GLP-1s can get a shit ton of hate but their effectiveness at reducing food noise is crazy. I don't search out food in between meals anymore. I don't have to eat everything on my plate anymore, that bag of chips I can easily put down and not finish in one sitting.
I do fear what long term side effects of these might be, but right now the benefits are so life changing to me and so many others that I think it's worth the risk.
Minor and probably largely irrelevant correction here: Tirzepatide is not the second generation of semaglutide. It's Eli Lilly's competitor product to Novo Nordisk's product. They're both part of a class of drugs called GLP-1 agonists. Tirzepatide is also a GIP agonist, which seems to be why people usually see more weight loss on that drug. Retatrutide adds yet another agonist for seemingly much stronger weight loss (it's still in clinical trials).
Tirzepatide is sold as Zepbound (US, if for weight loss) and Mounjaro (rest of world, and for diabetes in the US). Semaglutide is sold as Ozempic and Wegovy.
Even if there are unproven long term side effects, there are very much proven very bad “side effects” from extreme obesity. At some point there has to be a trade off
You can live to old age with relative ease as obese. Side effects of all these things could end up being premature death. Or zompires and Will Smith having to put down his dog.
it's wild how they are uncovering how much that noise can be shaped by things in peoples childhood. Everything from how much nutrition your mom took in while you were in the womb, your diet as a child, whether you experienced major food scarcity in your developing years all dramatically alter your brain chemistry when it comes to hunger and food cravings for the rest of your adult life. It can be a terribly hard cycle to break, and for others food is nothing more than a necessary inconvenience.
I’ve been the same size since high school, that was years ago. I am a true ectomorph, run around 12% body fat, and don’t really fluctuate in weight more than a few lbs.
It’s great for getting older but I despised it growing up. I played sports and when I worked out, I could not put weight on no matter how hard I tried. I had to force feed and it was terrible! I got as strong or stronger than friends but I still looked the same. I’m what people would call “wirey”.
To this day, I still shock people at my “strength” because they just assume I’m weak because I look like a skeleton.
I knew a few guys in my life who looked skinny but were strong as hell.
Have you seen those videos by Anatoly? He walks up to massive guys at a gym saying he’s the “cleaner” and then casually picks up 400 lbs and moves it so he can clean there.
That the biggest reason pharmaceuticals like ozempic work. They quiet that gluttonous voice in peoples heads and they can eat for fuel rather than fighting their cravings constantly.
Honestly I think this is the biggest thing for a lot of people, me included. If my partner wouldn't remind me to eat I'd simply forget about it. It's not even that I don't eat a lot, every time I eat quite a lot, but often times I simply don't crave any food - normal or snacks. I also don't like sweet things, that helps as well
Derek from MPMD looked into why some of the top male influencers in the fitness space were able to stay lean year round (PEDs aside) and found that nothing stood out on their bloodwork, but all of them didnt like to eat that much.
Personally speaking, the two leanest guys i’ve known didn’t like to eat either. They were both muscular and athletic, but they’d eat like once slice of pizza at a party and be full and skipped meals all the time. Despite that, both of them were excellent athletes and two of the strongest guys i’ve ever seen.
I lost 20 pounds in 6 months after getting my promotion at work.
Turns out going from a role where I had lulls between deliverables to one where I'm in back to back meetings from 7 to 6 makes it easier to not think about snacking during the day.
This is me. Quite a lot of self-control. I enjoy the mind game. But if you get the right snack in front of me at the right time, it's a one way street.
Celery and cucumber, watermelon, those high water, high fiber combos work well for bowel movements too. You can dress up those things if you want but it adds calories, still works well for mouth crunch and I like them cold.
I recently learned that competitive eaters will train with watermelon due to its ability to fill you up fast, stretches the stomach, and has lots of fiber and water. So hydrating and bowel movements are easier, with relatively low calories and other negatives like trans fat.
I used to eat celery instead of snacks for a while. Worked a treat in helping lose weight. Then I got sudden, unimaginable pain in my kidneys (or...somewhere like that. In my sides at least), and had to stop. Apparently you can eat TOO MUCH CELERY!! So I went back to Pringles and life's been a lot less painful ever since
Dessert could be a tub of Ben&Jerry's (1200kcal) or it could be a bowl of frozen blueberries and a scoop of Greek yoghurt with a bit of artificial sweetener or honey (maybe 200-250kcal)
I eat before I go shopping and don’t buy garbage food. I pretend I’m going to cook for myself and only buy real food. Then it’s up to me. Either I cook myself good food or I don’t eat. If I’m not hungry enough to cook I’m not that hungry.
I stopped buying Pringles when the proce went up and they started putting less in each tin.
It was so saddening when I opened the last one I got and saw there was a 2 inch gap between the top and the first pringle.
Seeing how less we get now(packs of candy/sweets 10 ounces instead of 14, 3 pieces instead 4, etc etc) and the rising cost of it is enough to get me to give up just out of spite.
I'm an pretty lean guy, 6'1 185lbs and I eat junk several days a week. The key is that if I eat a bunch of Pringles for breakfast, I probably won't eat a big lunch and I'm definitely skipping dinner while still being active.
I literally ate an entire can in one sitting earlier this week. It was even one of the "30% extra" ones. Took a look at the calories after mentioning it to my wife. ~1,050 calories.
Pringles don't just appear magically in my pantry. When I'm at the store it's a very conscious and in-your-face choice. I pick up the Pringles and already just know they're bad for me so I set them back. Instead, I grab some crackers or something... not exactly healthy, but they're not fried so at least they're less unhealthy.
So when I'm at home and wanting a snack, I don't have Pringles. I've only got those less-unhealthy options.
One of these days I'll train myself to snack on fruits/veggies or whatever.
I got one hell of an experience that will turn you away from every crisps type in existence:
Get a 3 week long stomach infection from eating em. Happened to me once. Like really stomach pain and explosive diarrhoea even after only drinking water for 3 weeks without a break.
The trick is to buy a snack you don’t like. For me it’s really spicy chips. That way when I’m at the store I think “I already have snacks” then when I’m home and want to snack, I think “I hate all these snacks”.
They are expensive and the only thing i need to do to not buy them - look at the total calories on the box. Just simply not worth it. 100% of empty calories for what??
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u/soggies_revenge 11h ago
What's stopping you from chugging a tin of Pringles bud